Sweet Fish Tart

It has been a long day, so there is a brief recipe. From Philippine Welser’s collection: A sweet fish tart

244 To make a fish tart

In the beginning, you must take a piece of fish, be it trout, pike, or another kind, as you can get them, that was boiled hot. Take out the bones everywhere and cut this hot-boiled piece of fish into small pieces and diligently pound it in a mortar as finely as possible. Then take half a pound of good almonds that were also diligently pounded separately and pass the fish and almonds through a sieve with one or two eggs, but no more, and as they are (with whites and yolk). Then take a Seutel full of sugar, add a little rosewater, set it over the coals and let it melt (until it becomes) like water. Take whatever parts of the fish and almonds could not pass through the sieve the first time and pass it through again with this melted sugar. Stir it all together with all diligence and add cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and pepper. There must be more of cinnamon (than of the other spices), and it is most necessary. You may use a little of the other spices according to the occasion and the size of the tart. Make it with its dough and cover of sugar, egg whites, and rosewater as is described for the first tart. This will become a good tart.

This is the next recipe in the sequence of tarts at the end of the manuscript, and certainly a strange idea to modern sensibilities. Sweet fish dishes are not unknown in the medieval tradition, but this one takes it farther than most: White fish and almonds ground with eggs and sugar syrup, then heavily spiced and baked under what is probably a kind of meringue topping. It is likely to come out tasting like spicy marzipan. I do not think the fish is going to be very noticeable, though of course that will depend on the proportions which we do not learn. I am not sure it is worth the trying, but if I ever have a piece of cooked trout left over, I may give it a go.

Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.

The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).

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